"Could Michigan or any other major predominantly
white institution
have produced a Dr. King?" asked Prof. Aldon Morris,
chair of
Northwestern University's sociology department and former
assistant
chair of U-M's department, in beginning his lecture "Race and
the
Academy: A Continuing Dilemma for the New Millennium."

Morris said
the answer was no for two reasons. First, because
King's predominantly
Black alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta,
provided "an intangible
something" to its students that instilled in
them "the idea that the sky
was their limit when it came to pursuing
intellectual excellence." And
second, King failed a battery of
admissions tests at Morehouse but was
accepted because he convinced
the college president that the school would
be underestimating him if
it barred him because of his poor test
scores.

"How many Kings were never discovered because standardized
tests
stood in the schoolhouse door?" Morris asked. "Many whites
continue
to believe that Blacks are intellectually inferior---whites who
are
educated and who believe they are enlightened. There still exists
a
deep-seated white belief in Black inferiority, and this belief stands
in
the way of building a truly inclusive society."

"Upon a pervasive
belief in Black inferiority," Morris told his
audience of 100, "has rested
white privileges in jobs, education,
income, housing and social status," a
belief anchored in a system of
material interest "and translated into
money, power and privilege of
whites over Blacks. As a result, Blacks have
been portrayed as
deserving to be on the bottom."

The 1960s and 1970s
brought change, Morris said, when
predominantly white schools began to
admit significant numbers of
Blacks and to hire a few Black professors
after 200 years of
systematically excluding them. "Did this reflect a
collapse of the
belief in Black inferiority?" he asked. "No. It reflected
the results
of Black protests in the courts, the streets and the
academy."

With a booming national economy in the 1960s and 1970s and
low
unemployment rates, "the presence of Blacks in colleges
and
universities did not frighten whites," Morris said, so
university
gatekeepers "let Blacks cross the racial divide into the
white
academy." The belief in Black inferiority "went underground,"
he
argued, but has re-emerged not only in the arguments of opponents
of
affirmative action programs but even in arguments supporting
diversity
and multiculturalism programs. "When have you heard the
argument that we
need Black students on campus because they are every
bit as smart as
whites?" Morris said. "You don't hear that."

Surveys indicate that
many whites still characterize Blacks as
being unpatriotic,
violence-prone, unintelligent and lazy, Morris
said, and academic leaders
disclose this attitude when they credit
the "knee-jerk" beliefs that a
substantial population of Black
students on a campus causes a lowering of
standards of excellence and
that Blacks' low performance on standardized
tests means Blacks are
less qualified to enroll in college and less likely
to succeed there.

As for test scores as a measure of academic
potential, Morris
cited the conclusion reached by Neal Rudenstein, now the
president of
Harvard University, in 1966, when Rudenstein "endorsed a
study that
concluded: `We pay attention to test scores, but what they tell
us is
quite limited. Our studies at Harvard show that personal
strengths'
are the key factors in academic success, not test scores, and
that
`effective intelligence' depends on energy, imagination,
curiosity
and other qualities that standardized tests don't
measure."

Test scores, however, are now used "to accomplish the
exclusion of
Blacks so as to re-create the 19th century make-up of
college
campuses," Morris said. "The belief in Black inferiority has led
to
Black deficit analysis rather than organizational
analysis."

Because structural change comes slowly to institutions,
Morris
advised Black students "to deal with what confronts them now."
"All
Blacks have sensitive antennae that detect whites who believe
in
Black inferiority and who can make that belief a
self-fulfilling
prophecy," he said. "So in the short term, Blacks must
continue to
develop an adversarial model of achievement; they must achieve
in
spite of what their teachers" may think of them "by working
harder,
longer and more tenaciously than others."

Morris ended his
talk by observing that it would help the white
gatekeepers to come into
frequent contact with "the genius of Black
life," and that "not all whites
believe in Black inferiority, while
some Blacks do believe in it. We carry
a tremendous burden, as do
women and other minorities. We are made to
feel, `If I fail it
reflects on my whole race.' Imagine white people
feeling, `If I fail
it means all white people are stupid.'

"I see
Black students feeling I'm unfair to them if I'm hard on
them. But I know
when you leave, you'll run into people who will push
you hard for reasons
other than why I push you. My approach to all
students, not just Black
ones, is to make them work hard."

Morris said that "we should also
recognize that things are far
better now than they were 20 to 30 years
ago. In most recent decades,
few graduate departments had even two Blacks
in a program, so the
five or six we have in some now is a big gain. That
model of
achieving runs deep in our history."